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Friday, December 18, 2015

Eye On the Blog: Project Bento

Linden Lab has been working on what is the biggest development in avatar design in many years. On Wednesday December 16, they announced on the official blog details about "Project Bento." With new bones added to the avatar skeleton design, people will not only be able to create more detailed avatars, with flexible fingers and other details, but also fancier ones for beyond human norms, such as wings and tails.

We are introducing extensions to the
standard Second Life Avatar Skeleton that give you dozens of new bones
to support both rigging and animation, and accompanying new attachment
points! This extended skeleton, which is fully backward compatible with
existing avatars, rigging and animation, gives creators the power to
build more sophisticated avatars than ever before. The extensions for the skeleton include:

11 extra limb bones for wings, additional arms, or extra legs.

6 tail bones

30 bones in the hands (all 10 fingers!)

30 bones for facial expressions

2 other new bones in the head for animating ears or antennae

13 new attachment points associated with the new bones

The Lab went on to say they had developed the project "in
collaboration with many expert Resident content creators and with the
developers of the most popular tools for creating avatars and
animations, so there will quickly be versions of those tools you can use
to help take advantage of these changes."

More information on Project Bento can be read in the Knowledge Base. Those interested in testing Bento and giving feedback have been asked to check out the "Project Bento Testing" on the Second Life Wiki page.

The Lab has emphasized that they are taking care to make sure the updates are backwards-computable with existing avatar designs. For now, the changes can only be seen on the Aditi Beta Test Grid, "Once we have finalized the skeleton
extensions, we will enable uploads using them to the main Second Life
grid and the real fun can begin!"